The Farm (29 page)

“Exactly. He has a two-hour lead. And a faster car.” He took the trash from her and dumped it into one of the brass collection bowls that had been tucked onto the shelf inside the pulpit. The chips he placed in a second bowl and set it on the bench. If the Dean was still tracking the chips, Carter didn’t want to tip his hand to the Dean by destroying them now. “You’re in no condition to go out there and look for her. You’re tired. You need to rest.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared him down. “I’m not just waiting here while my sister is out there alone with the Dean. That’s not going to happen.”

He pulled his matchbook from his kit and lit the contents of the bandage bowl on fire. “You think getting yourself killed is the answer? It’s night. The Ticks will be everywhere. You’ll be bait the second you walk out that door.”

“You said—”

“Whether they can smell your blood or not, they’ll be able to smell you. And they’re hungry. The fact that one ate that Collab is proof of that.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, Lil.” And he really was. “There’s just no way we can go rescue Mel. Not tonight. Not when we don’t even know where she is.”

“But you’ve already proven that you’ll say anything—even lie through your teeth—if you think it’s going to keep me safe. So I can’t trust your opinion on this. I can’t let you decide.”

He shook his head. “Yes, I’ve lied to protect you in the past. But I’m not lying now. Going after Mel would get you killed.”

“She could be in danger and the trail is growing colder by the second. I’m not going to sacrifice her life for mine.”

“I’m asking you to think about it. The Dean knows enough about Ticks to keep moving. He’s got a fast car. I’m sure he’ll keep driving. But it’s you he wants. Not her. She’s just a bargaining chip. The smartest thing we can do now is stay safe and hidden. We’ll get some rest. Come up with a plan in the morning.”

For an instant, Lily’s determination faltered. He’d almost convinced her. And then his phone rang.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Mel

Ladybird isn’t a bird at all. Not even the vulture I thought. Worse than the Ticks, even. Orcas may kill for fun, but at least they eat their prey. They lost their music to disease. He gave his away.

His fear is an ugly sound, a primal screech that I can’t hush and nothing, not even my own music, can make it stop.

Dread, like Chopin in B flat, creeps through me and I let it come; even slow notes might block his noise. I always thought death would be silence. Instead, it screams.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Lily

Carter was right. I was exhausted. I’d caught only a few hours of sleep the night before. And even though the thought of my sister alone out there scared the hell out of me, everything Carter said made sense.

And on top of that, my head was actually starting to ring from my exhaustion. Just a low, thrumming sound. Like the phantom buzz of a cell phone.

Except, as soon as I heard it, Carter cursed.

His expression shifted from fierce determination to chagrin. Then he propped a foot on one of the benches, pulled up the leg of his jeans, and removed a cell phone from a case strapped to his leg.

Even though I’d seen him use it before, I’d forgotten he had it. That anyone might have access to that kind of technology.

He met my gaze as he listened to whoever was on the other end.

I raised my eyebrows in question.

He just frowned, then he looked away, concentrating on the conversation.

After a minute, he pulled the phone from his ear, covering the mouthpiece, and said the last thing I expected.

“It’s for you.”

I responded with a very elegant, “Huh?”

“It’s the Dean,” Carter said, meeting my gaze. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Oh.” I licked my lips, battling my confusion.

Carter pressed the speakerphone button then held it out to me. I took it, marveling at the feel of it in my hand. It felt strange and foreign, not just because it was bigger than my old cell phone, but because I hadn’t held a phone of any kind to my ear in over six months.

“Hello?” I said into the phone, my voice shaking a little. I cringed. This asshole had my sister. I couldn’t let him think I was weak.

“Well. Miss Lily Price.” His voice was condescending and desperate all at the same time. “You are a young woman everyone seems to want.”

“Lucky me.”

“Do you have any idea how much trouble your disappearance could cause me?”

“I—” My urge to deny his words was automatic, but I cut myself off. The time to play ignorant was past. It no longer mattered whether or not I had this stupid power everyone claimed I had. Other people believed it. Assholes like this who were willing to use my sister to get to me. It had to stop now. “You better not have hurt my sister, or I will personally hunt you down and tether you out to a post at night.”

The Dean gave a nasty sort of chuckle. “You’re threatening me. That’s cute. You’re a seventeen-year-old girl. All alone in a world of scary monsters. No matter what extraordinary powers you might have, you don’t have the slightest idea how to use them.”

The Dean paused—for dramatic effect, I assumed. When he did, I glanced at Joe and McKenna. Neither looked shocked by the Dean’s words. That meant at some point in the past twenty-four hours or so, Carter must have told them he thought I was an
abductura
. And that they must have believed him, which disconcerted me.

I didn’t have to consider it for long, because the Dean kept talking. “I can protect you. You need me. But you’re threatening me? What are you going to do, beat me up with your schoolbag?”

I could have told him the truth. I could have told him that I wasn’t all alone. Whether I liked it or not, I had Carter here. And Sebastian—though I definitely didn’t like that. Joe and McKenna had also come to stand nearby, listening to the conversation. Though their first loyalty would always be to each other, they would help me however they could. I believed that now. I also could have told him that I didn’t have a schoolbag. I’d accidentally blown it up in the middle of the quad with the same kind of bomb that had taken a chunk out of the science building.

But if this skeezeball wanted to underestimate me, that was fine by me.

“Is my sister unharmed or not?”

“She’s fine. But she’s not the one I need. You have no idea how valuable you’ll be to me.”

“What are you doing to do? Sell me to Roberto?”

“Unlike your pet vampire, Roberto isn’t the kind of man who buys what he wants. He’s the kind who takes it. So, no. I have other plans for you.”

I shuddered, instantly deciding I didn’t want to know what those plans might be. If he, too, thought I was an
abductura
, he might very well plan on keeping me chained up somewhere just so he could use me like a microphone. The creep.

“If you want me, all you have to do is come and get me.” My mind raced with sudden clarity. “You’re still on the run. But you can’t keep driving all night long. We have sanctuary. You’ll be safe here. I’ll leave with you in the morning.”

“How stupid do you think I am, girl?” he asked with a sneer. “I’ve seen more of what these things can do than you can imagine. No way am I going out at night. Even though I loaded myself up with progesterone before leaving the Farm, I’m not going to risk it. Not even for you. No, you just sit tight. I’ll call back in the morning and tell you where to come meet us. Sunrise is at six fifty-four. I’ll want you here no later than thirty minutes after that.”

He hung up before I could ask him anything else. I stared at the phone in disgust for a second before handing it back to Carter.

“What did the Dean say to you before you put the call on speakerphone?”

“Not much. He said he had Mel, cursed me and Sebastian a little bit, and then asked to speak to you.”

“He didn’t say anything that might have told you where he and Mel are?”

“No.”

Joe stepped closer. “He said he wasn’t going back outside. That implies he’s somewhere safe right now.”

“He could be in another church,” McKenna pointed out.

“Or another Farm.”

But Carter shook his head. “No, the Farms are all clustered together to make it easier to supply them. The closest Farm is about five hours away. Even if he really booked it, he wouldn’t have made it there by sundown. And no Farm would open its gates at night.”

“So they’re in a church, right? Carter, is there anywhere other than holy ground humans can seek sanctuary?”

“Not that I know of. If we’re going to look for her, we’ll need a map of the area and a phone book with a list of the local churches.”

“I saw a phone book in one of the cabinets,” I said.

Carter fell into step beside me as I left the sanctuary. “I’ll look in the office. They might have a map there.”

Ten minutes later, we were back in the sanctuary. I’d found a couple of phone books fairly quickly. It took Carter longer to find maps, but eventually he came back with a local one and a state one. We laid them all out on the floor and set lit candles on the corners of the maps.

“Okay,” Carter said, uncapping a marker with his teeth and then spitting the lid onto the floor. He marked an
X
on a spot on the state map not far from the Missouri border. “Here’s where we had the showdown with the Dean on the highway. Here’s where we are now.” He put another mark on the map.

I had one of the phone books open on my lap and the other in my hands, thumbing through the churches section. “This is impossible. There are nearly thirty churches in this town alone. I had no idea small towns were this religious.”

McKenna lifted an eyebrow. “How long have you lived in the Bible Belt?”

I frowned. She had a point. But knowing there were a lot of churches somewhere and devising a plan to search all of them in the next six hours were two totally different things.

Carter ignored McKenna’s comment. “It’s not impossible. We just have to put ourselves in the Dean’s shoes. He’ll keep his car in the parking lot, because he’ll want it close. So we don’t have to search all of the churches. We just have to drive past them.”

Joe used his finger to trace a big circle encompassing the area around where we’d first encountered the Dean. “It was a couple of hours between when he grabbed Mel and when he called us. He could be anywhere within a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius.”

“No.” Carter tapped the
X
where we were. “He’d want to stay close to Lily. Remember, he’s tracking the chips. He knows where we are. He said he’d call us at sunrise and tell us where to meet him. He was going to give us thirty minutes to get there. No way is he going to risk her going out before dawn. That means he’s a half hour from here. Maybe less. That makes the radius more like thirty miles.”

I blew out a sigh. That was more reasonable, but it would still be a lot of churches. All before morning. With less than a full tank of gas. And if we ran out of gas, we’d all be dead. And then so would Mel.

We spent the next twenty minutes marking the locations of churches on the map. McKenna and I would read out the addresses and Joe and Carter would painstakingly find the streets on the map index and then mark them on the map itself. It wasn’t the first time I longed for a computer and an Internet connection, but it was the most desperate. What would have been a simple project on any mapping website was a chore that ate up precious minutes.

And the whole time, my mind raced through a hundred nasty scenarios that all ended with my friends dying in my quest to save Mel. Just a few hours before, I wouldn’t have considered Joe and McKenna my friends, but somehow, watching them together now, I could almost forgive Joe for turning me in to the Dean. He’d done it to save his baby. How could I blame him when I knew I’d do the same if Mel’s life was on the line?

As for McKenna, I felt queasy just thinking about how I’d treated her. And she wasn’t even a Breeder. What did it matter that we never would have been friends in the Before? Somehow, in less than twenty-four hours, it had become impossible to hate either of them. What Carter had said by the roadside that morning was right. We were in this together.

Of course, Carter was a different story. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. But I knew I didn’t want him risking his life for me anymore. Not because he thought I was the
abductura
who could save all of humanity and not because he felt compelled to love me.

No, I was the one the Dean wanted. And it was time I started fighting my own battles.

As we marked the last of the churches on the map, I put the phone book aside and said, “I appreciate all the help you’ve given me so far. But now that it’s time to go, I’m going alone.”

McKenna just stared at me mutely. Joe and Carter both broke into protest.

“We can’t let you do that,” Joe said.

“No way.” Carter crossed his arms over his chest like he was going to physically stop me from leaving the sanctuary.

“I should go with her,” McKenna said quietly.

Joe, Carter, and I all swiveled to look at McKenna. She stood off to the side, one hand rubbing the underside of her belly.

I saw her determination in her face and her absolute fear. I saw what it cost her to suggest it. To even consider it. And it all made me want to weep.

I’d been nothing but horrible to her and she was willing to risk her life to get Mel back. After all the horrible things I’d thought about her. How was it that McKenna was a better person than I?

There was a moment of stunned silence before Joe and Carter protested. My own protestations were caught in the lump of humble pie I was choking on.

McKenna held up a hand to ward them off and said, “The Ticks don’t like pregnancy hormones. They should leave me alone, right? So if anyone should go with Lily, it’s me. I should be safest.”

“No!” Joe all but yelled it. “No way. You’re not leaving this church. Not tonight. Not—”

“He’s right, McKenna,” Carter interrupted, more logically. “We don’t know for sure that the Ticks won’t go after you. I don’t like that they attacked the Collabs today. Either they’re hungry or . . . I don’t know what.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” McKenna said softly. “The Ticks attacked the Collabs, but not the Dean. Maybe he took their progesterone pills on the drive. Plus, Sebastian fed off that Collab, and didn’t he say he didn’t like progesterone any more than Ticks did? So the Collabs must not have taken their pills.”

Carter looked impressed by her logic. I was, too. Clearly I needed to accept that there was way more to McKenna than I’d thought.

Still, Carter shook his head. “We can’t risk it.”

McKenna stuck her jaw out at a rebellious tilt. “Then I think we should all go. If we separate now, then who knows when we’ll find each other again? The world outside this church is too scary to go it alone. We need to stick together.”

Her tone was simple but firm. Joe looked like he wanted to argue. I felt like I wanted to cry. I hadn’t wanted to be responsible for any more people. But now they were responsible for me.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and looked up to see Carter watching me.

“What do you say?” he asked.

“I can’t ask you—any of you—to risk your lives for Mel.”

McKenna’s brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t you do the same for us?”

Two days ago? No way. Even this morning, probably not. But now . . . yes, I would. Besides, there was a naïveté to the question that sucker-punched the last of my reluctance. Finally I nodded.

“Okay. We stick together.”